Never underestimate the power of free popcorn.
It is a lesson that Javad Parsa learned soon after buying The Graduate, the legendary, cash-only Oakland dive bar on Claremont Avenue. Free popcorn drew people inside the bar and kept them there.
“He loved to make salty popcorn so that people would drink more beer,” said Parsa’s daughter, Rebecca, who worked alongside her father at the bar in her early twenties.
But the popcorn machine will pop its last batch and the bar’s iconic neon sign will shut off for good sometime around 2 a.m. on July 1, because Parsa and his business partner, Majid Mahani, have decided to close the storied watering hole.
Parsa, who is 86, says age was one factor. Another is the disruptive nature of a cocktail bar in an otherwise quiet neighborhood.
“My partner is not happy having a bar in the building,” said Parsa, referring to Mahani. “The building is very nice and we have a lot of people. We have a nail salon, hair salon, a massage place, a restaurant. And these people pay good rent and they are happy. And we didn’t want to destroy this.”
And the insurance rate for the building is double what it would be without the bar, according to Parsa.
The closure will be a big shift for a man who has been in the bar business for decades.
Student discounts and underground discos
Parsa grew up in Iran where he studied pharmacology in college. He moved to the U.S. in the 1970s to finish his master’s in pharmacology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He then moved to Chicago, where he attended beauty school and briefly worked as a hairstylist, before operating his first bar called The Bar Association.
The irony of a pharmacist becoming a bar owner is not lost on Parsa.
“The pharmacy and the bar business is almost the same,” he said, and let out with one of his long signature laughs.
He ran the bar in Chicago for 13 years, before his wife grew weary of the cold and said she wanted to move to California.
“They wanted to get away from the snow,” said Parsa’s daughter Rebecca who was born during the family’s Chicago years. “Also, they didn’t like that they had to close down three months a year. During the winter, no one would come. Everything’s kind of shut down.”
In 1986, Mahani, who was then Parsa’s accountant, found a building for sale on Claremont Avenue in Rockridge. The two men bought it, moved their families to California, and opened the Claremont Diner next door to The Graduate. Not long after, Parsa and Mahani bought the bar and it had a symbiotic relationship wtih the diner for many years. Bar patrons could order food from the diner to supplement their free popcorn.
Parsa soon began offering student discounts: “Flash your student ID or report card at any time to get happy hour discounts daily open to close,” read a sign once posted at the bar.
People are like, ‘Can I get an Aperol Spritz?’ And he’ll just keep blinking until they order something else.
Cat, The Graduate bartender
Those discounts, plus the free popcorn, meant The Graduate was soon crawling with Cal undergrads.
But who came up with the name The Graduate is lost to history. Rumors have long circulated that a scene from the 1967 Dustin Hoffman film was shot at the bar. And, although much of the movie takes place in Berkeley and San Francisco, there is no indication that the bar was used in the film.
Before it was dubbed The Graduate, it was the Leilani Lounge, a Hawaiian-themed bar whose covered windows concealed the Hula dancers who would often dance on the tabletops.
Two armed robbers who held up the place in 1969 may have thought the lack of windows made for good cover. An article in the Oakland Tribune in August of that year with the headline “Bar Bandits Shoot Policeman in Legs,” describes the shooting of an undercover cop who was meeting with an informant at the Leilani Lounge. The cop intervened when two robbers entered the bar. After shooting the officer, the bandits fled with $170 from the cash register and $75 from the eight patrons at the bar.
The Leilani Lounge was sold in 1971, and soon after became The Graduate.
Stephen Williams, a local bartender, started going to the bar during that decade. In those years the bar opened at 6 a.m. and was frequented by workers from the Claremont Hotel, he said. And there was a dance floor in the basement.
“They called it the disco,” said Aimee, a former bartender who heard lots of bar lore while working at The Graduate from 2014 until November of last year. “But you couldn’t be that tall and stand up straight. People used to tell me they’d have to have their head at an angle to stay down there.”
The city shut down the dance floor because of the low ceilings, according to Parsa. The powers that be also put the kibosh on the student discounts sometime in the last decade.
But even after the discounts ended, drinks were still cheap. PBR pints were $1.50 and pitchers were $6. But then the bar stopped carrying PBR because a new basement cooler set-up could only accommodate smaller kegs. And PBR didn’t come in small kegs.
“So many people stopped coming to the bar and haven’t been to the bar since PBR stopped being on draft,” said Aimee, who declined to give her last name for privacy and safety concerns. “Some of them I missed and some of them I didn’t.”
While PBR may have been a fave for the budget-minded set, the bar also has plenty of signature cocktails, including the Pickle Back Shot: Jameson whiskey with a shot of pickle juice—a combo that Parsa’s daughter, Rebecca, introduced to the bar—and the Smokin’ Rita, a mezcal margarita made with jalapeno syrup that Parsa makes himself in his office above the bar.
The end of many eras
Parsa sold the Claremont Diner in 2015, but continued working at The Graduate. And still does. He’s there every day. Mixing up jalapeno syrup in his office, training bartenders, and even acting as the bouncer from time to time.
Aimee laughed remembering the image of Parsa, all “five-foot-nothing” of him, coming down from his office to scare away unruly customers.
“No one likes the wrath of Javad,” she said.
But mostly, he’s a jolly old soul, with an infectious, child-like laugh. He rarely bartends, but when he does, it’s an occasion.
“Yeah, whenever he bartends, people lose their minds,” she said. “I feel like he always makes the most money when he bartends because people can’t believe that he’s behind the bar. And he pours strong drinks.”
“I’ve seen him bartend once or twice,” said Cat, a bartender who has worked at the bar for the past six years who declined to give her last name for privacy and safety concerns. “But there’s newer drinks that he doesn’t know what they are. People are like, ‘Can I get an Aperol Spritz?’ And he’ll just keep blinking until they order something else.”
She recalled one of her first days tending bar. It was a Sunday afternoon and business was slow.
“Javad kept coming down and being like, ‘Oh, we might have to close the business,’” she said.
While Parsa was out on a walk, a customer showed up at the bar riding a horse. He tied it up outside and went in for a drink. Several passersby stopped to take pictures with the horse and then got lured into the bar. When Parsa came back from his walk the place was packed.
“He was like, ‘What happened?’” Cat recalled. “And I was like, ‘There’s a horse outside, and all of a sudden everybody wants to get drunk at three in the afternoon. Then he looked at me and he was like, ‘We need more horses to save this business.’”
But even horses won’t be able to save The Graduate this time, much to her dismay.
“It feels more like losing a family member than losing a job,” she said about the closing.
When news broke about the closing of the bar, many patrons posted remembrances on Facebook and Yelp. “End of an era,” wrote one customer. It’s a sentiment that Cat has heard often since word got out about the closure.
“People keep saying it’s the end of an era,” she said. “And I’m like, it’s the end of so many different eras.”
As for the final night, former bartender Aimee plans to be there, along with dozens of others. She said people are even trying to reserve seats. The max occupancy of the bar is only 42.
“It’s gonna be a proper send-off,” she said. “But we better not run out of alcohol. It’s looking a little slim in there. I was in there the other week and I was like, You better get more alcohol! You can’t run out! That will be a tragedy!”
